A new path

A New Path. Oil on stretched canvas, 6x12, sold

Yesterday morning, enough snow had fallen that I could not get the Miata out of the driveway. Heck, I couldn't even turn it around. Peter had a medical appointment, and so he had to take the VW. I canceled the meeting I was supposed to have, and I stayed home and shoveled and painted.

In the painting is the path that Kaja, the oldest dog, forged through the grove, to investigate Amos's grave. I struggled to make it look like a path, with shadows on one side, and light on another. I struggled with how to make the shadowed edge look sharp, even though its sharpness is composed of the softest snow.

No one else has walked the path that Kaja set in the snow. But Peter and I both shoveled new paths, and of course, the dogs made their own. Today, the snow has settled. It's mostly fallen off the branches. The dogs have run and rolled and romped and tracked it up. Jojo has perfected a sort of running attack, racing at Woodreau, the little bichon, and smashing into him. He rolls ass over tea kettle in the soft snow and leaps up, begging for more. She's ready to give it to him, too.

That's us as a country, isn't it? Except that the dogs have done it in fun, in play, and on a soft surface. We've been treated to eight years of the running attack, but f0r real, and on the hardest, most abrasive surface imaginable. And we've gotten up, time after time after time, only to find that we're targets again.

On this Inauguration Day, I'm excited and happy and proud to be an American. And most of all, I am relieved that the era of George Bush is finally, mercifully, finished.